Missouri's top student advocate in state politics since 1975.

Mental Health

We want to make sure every college student, no matter where they go to school, has access to the kind of timely and quality care they need to be successful.

THERE ARE FEW ISSUES we believe are as pertinent to the collegiate experience as addressing and preventing mental health issues. With demand for counseling services on the wide in our universities and nationwide, Counseling Centers across the state are finding themselves forced to cut back. This means instituting wait lists that jeopardize students’ well being. It means reducing outreach services that go a long way towards reducing stigmas and making sure students know what’s available to them. And it means a briefer model of treatment that does less to resolve the underlying issues that brought a student there in the first place.

There are no easy, overnight solutions to these problems, but we have to start somewhere. That is why ASUM successfully passed legislation in 2018 that requires public universities in Missouri to publicly report their compliance with professionally-recognized standards relating to student mental health services. This new law will allow us to establish a common benchmark across institutions so that we can more effectively determine where we are, and where we need to be. That’s also why ASUM convened a task force comprised of leaders from across the state to develop a set of recommendations key players can work toward to make a measurable difference. The task force’s final report can be found here.

ASUM is committed to exploring new avenues for advancing this cause in the coming legislative session. To learn more about this issue, click here for our issue fact sheet, and here for our fact sheet on why on-campus resources are particularly important.

About Us

ASUM is an entirely student-led organization advocating for positive outcomes for the 76,000 students of the UM System. While we work with the administration on many issues—like funding for higher education—we are not formally affiliated and answer ultimately to our fellow students. Lobby lawmakers, executive agencies, and administrators.